HP Omen 16 review: Master of mid-range

The HP Omen 16 offers a solid gaming laptop, at a competitive price point, with the latest Ryzen chipset, and flush with RTX 4060 graphics. But, is it worth imparting your hard-earned cash to pick it up?

Getting a new gaming laptop doesn’t have to be tough, and more often than not, you won’t have to spend thousands to get a pricey Razer product either. HP’s Omen 16 offers a good amount of power at a portable form factor that’ll surely scratch that portable gaming itch.

The laptop I tested was equipped with a 16-inch screen and flush with AMD’s Ryzen 7840HS, in addition to an Nvidia RTX 4060. This system should be more than capable of running the latest games, like Alan Wake 2, Starfield, Baldur’s Gate 3, and Modern Warfare 3. I spent around a month with the system to tell you if it is something that you should pick up for yourself.

Key specs

• CPU: AMD Ryzen 7 7840U
• RAM: 16GB DDR5-5600
• GPU: Nvidia GeForce RTX 4060 (8GB GDDR6)
• Display: 16-inch 16:9 (165Hz)
• Storage: 1x 1TB PCIe 4.0 NVMe SSD
• Operating System: Windows 11 Home
• IO: 1x 5Gbps USB-C, 1x 5GBps USB-A, Ethernet, 3.5mm combo jack, 2x USB-A, 1x HDMI 2.1, 1x Power
• Features: 100% sRGB screen, WiFi 6E, Bluetooth 5.3, RGB keyboard
• Price: £1499.99

Design

The HP Omen 16 isn’t exactly a looker. It’s an anonymous, black slab of plastic adorned with an ominous “Omen” on the top panel. Finished in black, the plastic top panel looks professional and offers a small lip in which the bottom half sits on top of the hinges of the screen. I prefer this look to other more overdesigned-looking laptops since it doesn’t scream at you with a boisterous “gamer” aesthetic.

You get a good amount of IO at each flank of the system, with a healthy amount of ventilation at the bottom, too. The squared-off matte black looks great here, though I do wish that it didn’t immediately become covered in fingerprints every time I even dared to look at it.

The charging situation isn’t too bad either, as you get a 230W charging brick in the box, and support for USB-C trickle charging.

Display

When you open the Laptop up, you will be greeted with a lovely 16-inch, 1080P display. While its specs are not too crazy, you can still get up to a 165Hz refresh rate using the system. I would have preferred a 16:10 display here, but 16:9 will allow you to play most games just fine since this is a gaming-centric laptop. You can expect to find full G-Sync support here, so even when you are playing demanding titles, you can still maintain a smooth image.

Keyboard & trackpad

That trackpad gets shiny fast.

The keyboard housed within the HP Omen 16 is merely serviceable. While it takes some adjustments, I was tapping away for hours at a time using the system. Additionally, the trackpad is not quite as big as I’d like, but a step above cheaper gaming laptops.

You get several dimming zones for RGB, and while that’s perfectly nice and all, during the day I turned this off to conserve battery. But, it can add a nice flair for those who are looking for a bit of oomph on their gaming laptops.

Software

The HP Omen 16 comes with McAffee by default, which I wasn’t a huge fan of since any added bloatware preinstalled in the system always sets off alarm bells in my head. The included bloatware managed to waste my time by interrupting performance benchmarks with adverts for VPNs. This is dreadful from HP, and should not be included with the laptop.

This is paired with HP’s Omen gaming hub, which allows you to configure all of your RGB lighting, in addition to giving users a simple resource monitor. Outside of that, you can also use their “Booster” which will disable some unnecessary applications while you game.

It’s all relatively simple to use, but the reality of using the laptop for a month meant that after having used it for around a month, I eventually ended up ignoring it entirely. With all of this in mind, what about how the laptop functions? We put it through its paces.

Performance

Powered by AMD’s Ryzen 7 7840HS, the HP Omen 16 isn’t lacking in power, paired with an RTX 4060, it offers a good price-to-performance ratio that you might be looking for in a gaming laptop, especially considering its 1080p screen, meaning you’re not spending more power trying to get more pixels out on the screen.

I tried a whole host of games, from Baldur’s Gate 3, to Final Fantasy XIV, that all worked without a hitch on the device, as well as putting it through its paces for our benchmark titles, as well as our synthetic benchmarks.

Synthetic performance

The HP Omen 16 managed to perform admirably when compared to higher-end laptops. What’s most interesting here is that the Blade 14 ends up being around 27% faster overall, while also being much more expensive than the Omen 16. This means that your dollars might go a bit further with a more reasonably-priced laptop, compared to options from Razer.

Don’t expect the laptop to offer eye-melting framerates, but all signs point towards solid 1080p performance.

Gaming performance

At 1080p, the HP Omen 16 manages to perform admirably in our small test suite of titles, which are designed to showcase just how well games will run in various scenarios. In pure rasterization workloads, like Forza Horizon 5, you can expect to get buttery smooth gameplay, with around 85 FPS expected if you whack the game on Ultra settings.

In Cyberpunk 2077, without any bells and whistles enabled with Ray Tracing set to Ultra, expect a worse time. Though, enabling DLSS 3’s frame-generation wizardry can help a lot here, bringing it up to more than playable framerates, just remember to enable Reflex here.

In esports workloads where you’re taxing the CPU, you should expect around 152 FPS in Overwatch 2. However, if you were to tune down some settings, you could easily attain over 200 FPS in this title.

I was left pretty impressed by the Omen 16, and while you’re not going to get bleeding-edge framerates, the silicon is clearly capable.

Thermals & battery

Throughout my testing, I observed that the laptop can get quite hot during operation, The GPU often spiked up to 87 degrees, which is its thermal limit. Here, clock speeds began to throttle down somewhat to stabilize performance. CPU temperatures on the other hand seemed well within safer levels. I just wish that the included fans were a touch quieter. This is a headphones-only system if you plan to game.

Battery life is better than average on gaming laptops I have tested. In a full work day without gaming, I managed to get a full day, or around 8 hours of battery life from the device. But, when you’re gaming, don’t expect more than around an hour and a half of operation when pushing the laptop to its limits.

Should you buy it?

The HP Omen 16 isn’t quite perfect, which is to say that the laptop does have some rough edges, the display is passable, but the finish is a total fingerprint magnet, and the build quality does feel like a notch above traditional budget gaming laptops from the likes of Acer and Asus. It offers a decent amount of power, and having the benefit of using a Ryzen processor does not go unnoticed.

If you’re happy with getting a gaming laptop, and want something slightly more premium than budget options, then the Omen 16 positions itself nicely.

The verdict: 4/5

The Omen 16’s biggest crime is in its thermal performance, noise and finish. If the company released a matte version, or a different colorway, I might feel differently. But, for the price that HP is asking for, the Omen 16 is more than a fair deal. Since we’re coming up to around Black Friday, you might even be able to save with a swanky deal.

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